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Sometimes life is so absurd in its pain and unfairness that a girl’s just gotta sing — or at least rewrite the songs she’s hearing. It takes a while for Zelma, the scrappy main character of the droll and vibrant My Love Affair With Marriage, to reach the point where she’s calling the musical shots, figuratively speaking. It’s an exhilarating and hard-won moment when she does.

At key moments throughout the animated feature, which takes her from age 7 through her 20s, she’s bombarded with the song stylings of three Mythology Sirens, harmonizing scolds who take different forms, depending on the circumstances. They reinforce Zelma’s self-doubt and castigate her whenever she breaks or questions the old-school rules of the boy-girl game, the ones that say women must be submissive — “a smart woman looks weak” — and that only marriage makes them whole.

Writer-director-animator Signe Baumane, who explored...